Throughout my stay in Japan, I have experienced living in three different homes. When I was younger, I had stayed a few times at my aunt’s condominium unit whenever my mom and I would visit her, her Japanese husband, and my beloved little cousin Riki.

It was a two-bedroom unit with a spacious living room. I specially remember looking out the veranda sliding doors a few times a day, and I was sometimes allowed to go out into the veranda itself. It was facing a wide field on top of a hill where high school boys would sometimes play baseball. My aunt’s house is located in a condiminium (called mansion in Japanese) surrounded by other apartment buildings situated on a top of a steep hill in a rather peaceful semi-rural area close to where Tokyo Bay and the Pacific Ocean meet.

Later on, I also experienced living in a old, small two-storey house when I was taken in by a Japanese family. It was attached to a bigger house by a quaint garden.

Finally, a few months into our relationship, I decided to move in with my amazing partner. We’re living in a one-bedroom condominium unit in a very convenient residential area in Tokyo surrounded by konbini (convenience stores), clinics, and a 24-hour grocery store. It’s also located near Tokyo Bay!

Living in a mansion involves quite a number of rules depending on the apartment. Some allow pets, some don’t. Interestingly, one of last week’s presenters in my Visual Anthropology class mentioned how some apartments allow pets but not foreigners in order to prevent problems of miscommunication arising from the language barrier between the tenant and the landlord.

Since we’re living in a 1LDK (one bedroom with a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen), our space is quite limited. Fortunately, we do have several storage cabinets. We actually have two for food near the kitchen. One of these cabinets also stores game CDs, boxes for electronics, and other things we almost never use but would like to keep just in case.

Aside from this, we do have two other storage cabinets near the door. One is used for shoes and the other for stuff we’d like to throw away (e.g. two old printers, an old rug, and several cardboard boxes).

What’s supposed to be the bedroom has my partner’s drumset instead. However, since we’ve received two complaints about loud noises and vibrations from our neighbours, he sadly hasn’t been using it since then. This is another disadvantage of living in a mansion–one has to be careful about making loud sounds, so there’s no freedom to play instruments or some funky celebratory music. Sadly, this means we can’t turn the house into our own private dance club whenever we feel like it. 🙂

The living room is essentially our bedroom, where our double bed is located across a wide wooden table. The latter is our study, dining, and gaming area where we work on our laptops and read books, and have our meals if we’re at home. It’s also where we play The Elder Scrolls Online and, recently, Red Dead Redemption 2 on our PlayStation consoles and two flat-screen monitors.

While we do love staying at home most weekends and most days during semestral breaks, there are a couple of things that we don’t really enjoy about our house. For one, the bathtub is small and my 6 ft. 1 partner cannot fit in it. This problematic feature is not exclusive to our house, as we have been to several hotels in and out of Tokyo and they all have tubs built for those of average Japanese size and height.

We’re also not very fond of the kitchen. As shown in the above photo, there’s but a small space for a chopping board. Since we’re busy university students, we always take our meals outside, buy from convenience stores, or order using food delivery apps. However, some weekends, when I do have some time to spare to make some homemade meals, I find it hard to cook because of the size of our kitchen.

Nevertheless, we love our current place. We like how comfortable our bed is and how well-insulated the room is during winter. We love the two wooden cube organizers from Nitori that we assembled ourselves. We love how the mansion is conveniently situated, that we need only but go down to the lobby and go to the drugstore and konbini next door to buy necessities and snacks. But most of all, we love how we have each other, helping us cope with the bads of not only our house but life in general.